


Are You There, Rose? It's Me, Lord English

by coolkidroland, odradek



Category: Homestuck
Genre: AU, Creepypasta, F/F, F/M, Illustrated Fic, Image Heavy, M/M, Slenderman - Freeform, [Redacted Number] of romantic entanglements, animated/flashing gif warning, dark fantasy/horror, you think i'm kidding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-06-05
Updated: 2012-08-06
Packaged: 2017-11-06 23:12:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 18,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/424281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coolkidroland/pseuds/coolkidroland, https://archiveofourown.org/users/odradek/pseuds/odradek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your name is ROSE LALONDE and you are a PARANORMAL INVESTIGATOR armed with the usual assortment of QUIPPY SIDEKICKS, SNARKY VAMPIRIC SUITOR, DISTURBING VISIONS, and even your own TELEVISION SHOW. The only things you lack are a TRAMP STAMP and a CHANCE FOR SURVIVAL.</p><p>Roll tape.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. ACT I Quelle Horreur: Scene I

==> **Super Kick-Ass Incorporeal Adventures** : Season 2: Episode 7: The Englishman

Rough-Cut

_whoa like super rough_

_  
_

 

 

 

==> **SCRIPT LOG** :

 

 

ROSE: The Englishman, to wit: a giant, green, time-traveling, demon quarterback. Chills.

JOHN: Also total fiction!

 

  
JOHN: Once upon a time, there was a forum. Where there is a forum, there is a troll. Where there is a troll, its name is usually Dave.

 

  
==> **FORUM LOG:**

 

  
_turntechGodhead_ : I’m an art student, which involves a lot of tramping through the woods behind campus during hunting season, praying that we get shot so we can make a meaningful abstract painting out of blood, IV fluids, and too many painkillers.  
  
The woods are spooky. I got drunk to fuck the shit out of my photography midterm, meant to be half commentary on genre, half commentary on a fuck-ton of natty light and my Hawaiian roommate's obsession with really good weed. Get a Hawaiian kid high and slap some bad make-up on him, set him loose in the woods.

 

  
John’s a film major, which amounts to having no ambition other than some day being able to order around sweaty action movie stars like the world’s shittiest dominatrix. Welcome to art school, boys and girls, good thing I’m well trained in the tough as nails world of pizza delivery because I’m going to get an A on this shit and that’s going to teach me a sum total of absolutely fuck all.  
  
For the record, Nihilism tastes a lot like Smirnoff.  
  
Coincidentally, Smirnoff also tastes like developing your photos and not knowing what the fuck. Maybe you accidentally drank the developer! Again! Boy howdy was that a fun trip to the ER and the salty tears of all the grown men who care for me.  
  
Or maybe it was someone driving down the highway looking for co-eds to murder with a headlight out. Padiddle!

 

  
False alarm John go back to looking menacing maybe take off your shirt a little yeah. No seriously get the fuck out of the way. We’re in Paulding Lights territory here, we’re going to set up a gift shop in a double wide and make millions.

 

  
I bet it’s the ghost of a deranged raver, doomed to wander forever, leading lost souls to their eternal suffering by the twin light of glowsticks.

 

  
At this point ‘no John you can’t make out with me our love is forbidden we are from two different worlds my accent is rugged and no one can understand yours’ turned into ‘John get out of the fucking frame satan is coming to devour your eyeballs and I occasionally find a use for you.’

 

 

At no point during the proceedings did I scream like a little girl and maybe cry for my bro-mom.

 

  
Because that face.  
  


 

  
I knew that face.

 

  
John he has come to take you away. Go to him. Go now.

 

 

_ectoBiologist_ : Hey guys! I have been scrolling through the thread and noting my deep abiding concerns. The first is that none of you are getting Paddy McGreenBay Pack-Hulk’s name right! He is not actually Jake English, people. He is to Jake English what the common tapeworm is to Frank Herbert’s Shai-Hulud. To avoid confusion in our shitty dorm room’s shitty kitchen debates, TG calls it the Englishman, which I assure you is the epitome of funny jokes. Some people have no appreciation for Jake English’s suave cinematic stylings, and he only wore that weird helmet in one movie!! One _really awesome_ movie, so I’m pretty sure he’d be happy to have his name shared with such a ferocious dude.  
  
Secondly, I couldn’t help but notice that some of you guys are totally not taking this seriously! That concerns me, because I risked my life for these photos. I do not want to be the guy at the beginning of the freaky sci-fi horror flick who comes back to Earth all ranting and raving and frothing at the mouth about a terrifying interstellar space threat only for nobody to believe him. That guy dies! Like, really early! Usually because the aliens get him, and oh man, Mr. Protagonist, you better meet this shit head on now! Ignored Warny Frothy Guy is the ironic tragedy who no one but the audience will ever mourn. That is so sad. I do not suck that much.  
  
So I am going to take a moment to address the concerns of CP up above. You find you cannot take the Englishdude seriously? He is too large? He is too obvious? He is not hiding, and so cannot surprise you? How is anyone supposed to consider such a stupid threat with due caution when the green dude is so clearly hanging out in the background while TG and I are not freaking out much at all? Okay well, here is the thing you have to know. The Englishguy is fast.  
  
Super fucking fast.  
  
So fast, in fact, that we saw nothing more than a flash of light before TG developed his film. But over time and consultation with serious science people who know serious physics shit, we figured that serious speed is the serious explanation. Why didn’t we see the Englishhomme when we were flailing about in the woods? Well, one, I was so high, you do not even know, I think I was rubbing my face on TG’s because his stupid scruffy beard felt so much like a loofah?? and two, Englishfella is a literal speed demon! Whoa!  
  
Why don’t you see him when he is right there in front of you? Too fast! Sonic the Hedgehog running away from questionable internet fandoms fast! The fastest thing there is. Mach 5 cheetah. I for one am shocked we got out of the woods alive, perhaps on account of my rad sexy make up. You cannot get away, guys. He is already here!

_commiePiglet_ : Hello, EB drunk posts, I’ve missed you.

 

  
==> **SCRIPT LOG** :

 

DAVE: This is actually how we met Jade. Beforehand I wouldn’t trust a furry as far as I could throw ‘em. Now I trust her as far as she can throw me and that girl can get some airtime on her underhand field goals.  
  
ROSE: Brilliant mind.

 

 

==> **FORUM LOG** :

 

gardenGnostic: FACT. What you’re looking at here is time travel! If your eyes have crossed and all you can read off my diagram is that I have done science to it, you should sit down and take a break. That’s okay! It’ll still be here when you get back. And when you do, we’ll get into the silly quantum shenanigans that are your physical dimensions.  
  
[ _Jade proceeded to blind us all with science and to make Dave feel funny things that he had never felt before about both physics and furries.]_  
  


==> **SCRIPT LOG** :

ROSE: You would assume, as with most of Dave’s drunken endeavors, that this silliness would have been lost to the ebb and flow of the internet, banished to the gutters somewhere alongside epic fails and arrows to the knee. Alas, Dave has proven himself some sort of horrifying meme wizard. It caught on.

 

 

ROSE: In some instances, much more in the spirit of the original and the dubious photoshop talents of its creator.  
  
DAVE: The Englishman is my bastard child. He shall never have my kingdom, but one day he may win... my heart.

 

 

JOHN: I think when your drunken shenanigans contribute to internet culture for three years and running you should be up for some kind of award.  
  
JADE: When you think about it, the Englishman is haunting... our careers!!! _Dun dun dun._  
  
ROSE: Let’s get this over with before I have to take another phone call about glowing green mutants in overcoats. The last thing we need is for Dave to actually be contagious.

JOHN: Do we have a script today? We do not have a script today. Hello, camera, old friend, best friend. We are exceptionally lazy this week and Rose’s head is being exceptionally nice to her, so we get to just hang out and tell scary stories about local monuments. –Oh shit, bluh, sorry Rose, I’ll cut that, uh, let me start again –  
  
Hi guys! As our returning fans will know, we make base in [REDACTED], New York, which is also home to the mysterious Felt Mansion. Kind of – hehe – _ironically_ , a lot of Englishman stories get told in these here parts, even though Dave and I were going to school in Washington when he made that all up. Anyway, Doc will tell us more about today’s shenanigans, so let’s go check in with her.

JOHN: Oops, sorry Dave.

DAVE: Jesus fuck-me christ Egbert, drop the dinky piece of shit and get on your mark.

JOHN: Geez, sensitive.

DAVE: Hold me.

JOHN: Going.

JOHN: Now where were we – right, Doc Harley!

JADE: Harder!

JOHN: Uh, HARLEY.

JADE: No, dumb-shit, Harley-Strider, Harder!

DAVE: Unh. UNH!

JOHN: Haha oh god. Doc Harder! What is on our plate today?

JADE: Explosives!

JOHN: Whoa!

JADE: Yessss so many of them!

JOHN: Okay, explosions are seriously great, and they are a project I can really get behind, but maybe we could get some context before you press that intimidating red button?

JADE: Yeah yeah. --Oh, should I just go on now? Oooh, hm, all right, wellll, there are a lot of stories about weird stuff going on around the mansion, so I figured we’d go all Mythbusters on its butt and try to replicate the purported paranormal activity!

Most of the reports come back to two main events: tremors in the foundation of the manor that shake the whole shebang, from walls to fixtures, and unusual lights in the windows. We’re going to wait until night time to deal with the lights and stuff. For now, I’ve rigged some key locations with a number of complex home-brewed detonation simulators of absolute legality, and I’ve also set up a series of sensors to measure the projected impact of each virtual explosion.

JOHN: Wow, that sounds like total bullshit!

JADE: I dunno, art school kid, maybe it is!

JOHN: I would never know! What I am getting from this implies there will be no real explosions, however, which is probably good because we do not have enough money to repay the damage done to a historical landmark. Not that the Felt Mansion really counts as anything such! Huh, can I segue?

JOHN: Bluh bluh, huge building. Nobody knows who built it, nobody knows who technically owns it or who ever lived in it in the past, kind of a derelict, local landmark, green glass windows. Makes the whole thing look kind of irradiated when someone is swinging a flashlight around inside! Really it is a bit of a mystery that no spooky stories had been attached to it before the Englishman. The collective unconscious sure is weird!

ROSE: Undoubtedly so.

JOHN: Aw, nice! Spooky lady get-up is go.

JOHN: Haha, oh my gosh, Rose, is that fishnet? Kanaya will have a fit.

ROSE: Ah, but you noticed. As she loses ground on the front of my sensibilities, she gains it on the field of your sensitivities.

JOHN: Well, then let us pretend I saw nothing. All right, Madame Lalonde, what does the all-seeing eye survey?

ROSE: Hm. Here? A decadent lot of nothing. –Ah.

JOHN: --Rose? Hey.


	2. ACT I Quelle Horreur: Scene 2

==>Seer: Wake up

You’d rather not.

==>Seer: Why?

That’s why.

==>Seer: Inspect your new surroundings.

They aren’t new. Neither are they surroundings, as such. There simply isn’t much to see.

==>Seer: What about that guy?

Oh, that guy.

Hello, asshole.

caw and shit

I don’t suppose I can expect a report on the cause of my current condition? At least, not extending beyond ‘shit be fucked up.’

yo girl drugs are bad  
stay in school  
eat a fucking sandwich

You’re a dick.

==>Seer: Blame the crow

An appealing diversion, but a diversion nevertheless. For one, you are loath to ascribe any more agency to the scurrilous feather duster than you already have. You are not in the habit of empowering figments.

For another, you doubt the crow extinguished the sun.

The trickster figure Raven has been known to steal celestial bodies. Perhaps you seek to follow in your celebrated cousin’s footsteps. You never could resist a leader.

cant snatch down the sun  
no shitty getaway vehicle large eno—

==>Seer: Motherfuck indeed.

The crow is a neurotic, excitable avian mess, but it has never once steered you wrong.

That’s new. You wonder what it represents.

Heel, asshole. Heel.

It seems even mysterious achromatic beasts appearing out of the inscrutable void grow tired of screechy spirit guides. Or whatever it is the crow thinks it’s doing in your dream.

thats right  
run motherfucker  
your kind aint welcome in these parts

A backward glance, and a glimpse of meaning. You’ve trained yourself to pick out the precious slivers of significance in each ghost of happenstance here in the rubble. Green light traces the path of the devilbeast’s eye; green like the sun, and not.

Wait—

Jade?

==>Seer: Follow the devilbeast

Fuck you.

==>Seer: Wake up

Please please please please please please please

==>Seer: WAKE UP

You cannot wake up.

What happened to you?

==>Seer: See

Oh. Well shit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the end of the image back-log! Hereafter things are likely to become somewhat more text heavy.
> 
> -Odradek


	3. ACT I Quelle Horreur: Scene 3

==>Seer: Be roofied.

 

 

Good job.

 

==>Jade: Be dead.

 

 

Working on it.

 

==>Karkat: Fuck up.

 

 

Done and done.

 

 

Your name is KARKAT VANTAS and you are beyond a shadow of a doubt the WORLD’S SHITTIEST WEREWOLF.

You should really FINISH THE JOB and KILL THE GIRL but you find for various shitty reasons that you simply CAN’T. You cannot do it. You cannot kill the girl.

Kill the girl, douchebag, you need to kill the girl. Or what? You wait and see if the full moon is full enough? You, still clinging to the tattered lie of your human skin, hang around on the evil off-chance she wakes up? You enjoyed it. You liked it, taking her throat out with your teeth, you sick fucker. You liked it and you hate it now. Fuck you in the past, fuck you every time you come home smeared with blood that stinks of people.

Or do you _want_ her to wake up, to join your merry existence as a monster that Satan vomited out and set loose upon the world, all bile and wreck and ruin? Are you hoping she'll get up and kill you, finally fucking kill you? With her stupid goddamned gun, why does she even have a gun? If she didn't have a fucking gun maybe you could have kept your cool, maybe she wouldn't be dying or, worse, _not dying_  right now.

Way to go, jackass.

You could host a seminar about how to fuck up everything, mismatch your tie and your jacket, button up your shirt wrong, and then disembowel somebody in the front row. Everyone would come for the shitty free lunch. It would taste of public restrooms and your mother’s shame.

You weren’t supposed to kill anyone; easy in, easy slip a mickey to the magical fucking albino lady, easy steal the cueball and get the fuck out of Dodge. Fucking oops.

She should have known better than to send you. She knows you’re a fuck up, has been getting all intimate with all of your inabilities, bad touching your rotten loser-soul. Should have known better.

 

==>Karkat: Be Past Karkat

 

 

But you hate that guy.

Question is, do you hate him more or less than you hate current Karkat? It’s hard to say.

Rose found Past Karkat lurking outside the Scooby Dipshit RV she and her posse of wide-eyed lunchmeats abide in while he was trying to remember how the fuck one went about asking for help. Or asking for anything, to be honest.

She took one look at him out the window and invited him into her home easy as you please, was all, “So tell me what it is you’re here for,” and clearly _knew_ there was something wrong with him, that he was a monster, that he was fucked up like a prom night mistake writhing under hell’s dumpster, and still made him tea, and sat him down, and didn’t make small talk exactly, but was some way, somehow totally at ease, even seemed to deliberately give him an opening to drug her drink, wandered off to get the fucking cueball and just laid it out there for both of them to stare at, and downed her chamomile-and-date-rape all in one gulp, went out like a –

 

==>Karkat: Can it.

 

You weren’t – oh shit –

 

==> **SCRIPT LOG:**

 

JOHN: Oh man, did you see that dude’s hot pants? I love Wal*Mart. How come Dad never took me to shop at Wal*Mart?

DAVE: I hate to break this shit to you, man, but your dad has standards.

JOHN: Haha, like you can’t buy cake mix at the dollar store -

 

==>Karkat: You’re really hungry.

 

 

Oh shit. Oh no. NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO

 

 

KILL HIM KILL HIM KILL HIM KILL HIM KILL HIM KILL HIM KILL HIM KILL HIM

 

 

DON’T!

 

DON’T DON’T DON’T DON’T DON’T DON’T

 

 

RUN

 

 

You tell the stupid tiny man thing to get the fuck out of the way. You’re probably being too subtle, he looks like an idiot.

 

 

Or maybe you just don’t enunciate well with a cueball in your mouth, jackass. MOVE, CAPTAIN DOUCHEBAG.

 

 

==>Dave: Close your mouth, you’ll swallow something.

 

 

You’ll swallow YOUR MOM. Wow that joke sucks in this grammatical tense.

 

==> **SCRIPT LOG** :

 

JOHN: Dave.

DAVE: Spank my ass and call me Charlie, that was a fucking werewolf.

JOHN: Dave.

DAVE: Did a werewolf just run the fuck out of our RV? How did it even fit in there, that’s some TARDIS bullshit, those things are huge. I bet it knocked over all the good dishes.

JOHN: Dave you need to go after the werewolf right now okay.

DAVE: What was a werewolf doing in our RV where are the girls, John, are the girls –

JOHN: Get in the truck. I need you to get in the truck.

 

==>Dave: Get in the truck.

 

 

Shit.

 

 

 Shit shit shit shit shit.

Get in the truck, Dave, he says. Follow the werewolf. Hunt down the fucking werewolf. Get in the truck. Of course you saw that thing run out with the cueball clutched in its jaws like a tweenybopper stuffing stolen merchandise down her nonexistent cleavage. But you didn’t see Jade. Didn’t see Rose. No, for you it was only werewolves and John half-way to a panic and your total fucking inability to tell him ‘no.’ You got way too goddamn used to doing what he told you to during college.

So you got in the truck. Like you’re god damned Buffy in a skimpy tank top instead of some dumbshit guy who doubles as a trouble magnet. You’re all trouble magnets, ever since Rose. Or maybe since before Rose, and she just pried it all out of you and into the open, cut the tethers between you and respite to set the four of you adrift, doomed to always be stuck in this storm.

_your tires could blow you could drive straight into the swamp and they’d never find your body you could hit that tree at just the right angle and even with an airbag your neck would snap a deer could run out into the road put bits of bone and truck through all your organs you could flip this stupid Dodge into the forest and crack your head open and bleed and bleed_

Your fingers tighten on the steering wheel until they’re white with ache. Stop, you need to stop, cut that shit out, tamp it down, can’t tear open that old wound to bleed out the poison because it’ll just pour on out of you and go on and on until you choke and drown on all that -

_you can't afford to drown drowning is panic hard pressure like a boot on the chest pushing into your sternum cracking bones you're not a man used to losing fights especially not against your own body but your body is pitiful and stupid and can't draw the boundary lines between itself and all the pains of the world your body is a temple and it has been fucking ransacked_

You grit your teeth against the flow and only manage to redirect it.

You could have been in the RV when the werewolf came in, ripping out stomachs or throats or tearing off heads, it’s a werewolf, there are almost too many ways to die when a werewolf comes crawling under your door and you’re eating dinner or watching youtube or holding someone’s hand.

Like Rose. Rose who would totally invite a werewolf into your god damned home because she is friend to all the jacked-up little animals. Maybe it was a werewolf-lady she was making out with, because god knows vampires probably get old after a while. Gotta spice things up. One day you’ll come home and she’ll be making out with Jade –

Jade, who didn’t want to come on your super rad grocery adventure. Your wonderful, genius, horrible internet-furry wife, who you married in Vegas, until death by horrible werewolf mauling do you part and you left them there with John and his goddamn first-aid kit, and you’ve got a lot of love for John but he’s neither of the girls in a crisis –

 

==>Dave: Be Past Dave

 

 

You try, but nothing was really Dave at the time.

_you are guide seeker speaker for the dead you are the voice you are the answer after hours after shudders after mold and rot and dust you are last you are an end you are next first waiting you are full and limbed and ready set going you are a life in death and a death in this life and this life is yours in service it is your right it is your purpose it is your need ache need_

_lady you have a fucking job to do_

 

 

Ow.

 

 

This shit really never ends well.

 

==>Dave: Turn back.

 

 

Sounds like a plan. Last thing you need is for Jade to come out the other end of this a legit furry and for you to be AWOL when the last thing _she_ needs is to be minus a mercy killing. She’d do the same for you.

Oh shit wait no there he is. Let’s get that asshole.

 

 

John loves this truck. He’s going to kill you, if splattering into the werewolf at top speed doesn’t. You’ll tell him you buckled up. He’ll appreciate that.

 

 

You are a tank, these woods are your Tiananmen, and that cocksucker is your fuzzy fucking pancake.

Yippie-kie-yay, motherfucker.

 

 

Metal shrieks, airbags deploy, and two tons of hatred slam headfirst into a sack of carnivorous meat. The truck surprises you by staying in one piece, if a mangled one. The werewolf fails to surprise you at all; it goes down but it doesn’t break, doesn’t bleed, and if its limbs are all twisty-Gumby-murder-mode haywire, that’s nothing new, just monsters as freaky fucking usual. It might be choking on the cueball a little. God you hope so.

Your hand finds your knife in the glove compartment. You stagger out of the cab and tinnitus warps long and sharp in your left ear. Nothing smears a Strider on the windshield. A Strider finishes the job, no matter what. Even if you gotta finish that job a little concussed.

Better get this done quick, before it gets its ugly ass up.

 

 

Too late.

 

==>Karkat: Feed.

 

 

KILL IT KILL IT KILL IT KILL SOMETHING YOU HAVE TO KILL SOMETHING YOU’RE HUNGRY SO HUNGRY SO FUCKING HUNGRY YOU NEED TO EAT YOU NEED TO YOU NEED IT NEED IT NEED IT NEED IT EAT IT BE FULL BE FILLED SATE YOUR GUT YOUR SOUL AND THEN AND THEN CRAWL SOMEWHERE DARK AND SMALL TO SLEEP AND FORGET FORGET DON’T KNOW JUST FORGET NOW EAT IT KILL IT EAT IT EAT

 

 

THE HELL IS THIS.

HE’S A MONSTER.

HE’S ONE OF.

HE’S.

YOU STILL WANT TO

EAT IT REND SEVER SINK YOUR TEETH CLAWS THUMBS IN OVER YOUR TONGUE TEAR APART RED PIECES ALL PIECES IN YOUR MOUTH SWALLOW DOWN YOUR THROAT UNTIL YOU CHOKE SUNK IN YOUR BELLY AND YOUR GLUT AND WARM HEAVY FULL SWEET

but he’s a monster, and that’s not right, a monster is

FILTH BILE TANG

He smells like a fucking Happy Meal.

Oh shit.

What the fuck.

Your fingers loosen. You recoil. Your throat is warped and thick with the memory of a horse pill shaped like a cracked fucking skull. You swallowed the cueball. You swallowed the fucking cueball and now it’s inside of you, just like this burbling upset scream bursting ragged out of your stomach:

MONSTERS DO NOT EAT MONSTERS

YOU STUPID SACK OF SHIT

 

==>Karkat: Abscond.

 

You save your fury. Keep it buried in your chest where it can fester and grow needles into your lungs and every breath you take for the next thirty-odd days will be a razor-edged post-it note on your soul, half I’LL KILL YOU and half I’M SO FUCKING SORRY and all of it so, so mad.

 

==>Dave: What the ever loving fuck.

 

 

I really can’t tell you, Dave.

It’s not like you’re not grateful for your life. You are, pretty much. As experiences go, you didn’t like dying. But you’ve never been so close to being a monster’s midnight snack and had it up and scamper away like that. You know ever since the crow that your savory eat-me pheromones have been hells of less luscious than say, Jade’s, or John’s, or god fucking forbid, Rose. But it had you pinned. It had you dis-fucking-armed. It had its hairy black yeti fingers wrapped around your throat and then it just.

Let go.

You have never had a monster _give up_ in the middle of trying to tear your face off. Seen it throw in the towel like the towel is used spunk kleenex and effort is the receptacle of all its hyper-violent hopes and dreams.

So you gotta know. What’s wrong? Is it him? Is it you? Maybe you need a shower?

Better go ask it.

With your fists.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) Is now an inappropriate time to add the Karkat/Everyone relationship tags? Probably. *clicks*
> 
> 2) Consistent style? Haha what? I'd offer a doodle of the Homestuck character of your choice being irrationally angry at an inanimate object to anyone who could find a visual discrepancy between a couple or more panels but then I would never stop having to draw :\
> 
> 3) Really though NEXT chapter will have less art. It will. I know it.
> 
> -Odradek


	4. ACT I Quelle Horreur: Scene 4

==>Dave’s phone: Be neglected like a child raised by Dirk Strider.

 

 

==>Kanaya: Ascend

 

 

A mother will do what is best for her children. You are not Karkat’s mother. He most certainly is not your child. Nevertheless, you are COMPELLED to do well by him.

You tend his sores and make him dinner, then you leave him in your basement to work out his more Gordian feelings in his own addlepated company. Though possessed of remarkable mental fortitude, even Karkat’s communication suffers in his current state.

He doesn’t have the cueball, not on him. But then, you have seen his eyes. Green light flares, diminishes, then blisters within the hollows of his pupils. You suspect the problem is not whether Karkat retrieved the cueball, but what preposition you use to describe its current location.

You are unenthusiastic about your options at present.

This is not your first rodeo, though at this rate it may well be your last. As a general rule, the cueball welcomes your intercession. You have no doubt it anticipated and played to your every specific instruction to Karkat: arrive at [REDACTED] lakeside campsite where their RV is parked by 20:30; appeal to Rose with the simple piteous state of the truth – that you are hungry, and tired of it; a carefully pre-measured dose of flunitrazepam. You are almost certain—You are sure—You think—It is probably the case that—

You slip down that slope and straight into the swampy mess of memories. You feel as though you have just walked into a patio door. Your silver tray of mimosas spills. Glasses crack. Your dress is stained. You have fucked this up before, and you are deeply concerned that you have just fucked it up again.

For a moment you stop on the stairs and grip one hand tightly around the other. Your blood-flecked handkerchief digs folds into your wrist. You live less than twenty miles from the seer; you know her friends, her family, and as much as you can of her, as much as she will let you; you have done your duty; you no longer want to; you can fix this; you don’t know how to fix this; you will try; you are trying; you do not want the seer to die; it would probably be for the best if she did; you do not really care, because you see the problem may be that you have found that you are terribly, stupidly, awfully fond of her company.

Air stings the back of your throat. You are unaccustomed to breathing, but it has been known to afflict you when you are upset. Your back is miserably tight. You exhale and wait for your lungs to relax. All the while, you chide yourself. You acted ahead of schedule; it is not too late; you may not know for certain where the damn thing is, but you have taken a step, and as long as you are walking, you are not dead in any way that matters, and maybe, maybe, you will save her.

There are two doors to your basement, one at the top and one at the bottom of the stairs. For reasons obvious to any sensible vampire, each locks only from within. You close the second door behind you.

Though you cannot force Karkat to stay, you think he will fester in the basement for a while. He is easily troubled by even the most well-intentioned of his actions, and now that he has slaked the bloodthirst, he is likely to dwell. As you would rather not wrestle a werewolf twice tonight – not in chiffon, at least – you are content to leave him to it. You will simply have to hope he does not remember how to use his thumbs. On the other hand, it is infinitely more probable that he will instead decide to beat down the steel fortifications of your daytime lair with his head. You have no doubt he would succeed.

Loath as you are to sleep, with the cueball unaccounted for, and Karkat suffering the most extraordinarily violent fit of the vapors, you are exceptionally tired, and morning cannot come soon enough.

 

==>Morning: Come.

 

Laughable. It is readily apparent to even the untrained eye that the glow outside your window is not morning. If it were, you would be slightly more on fire.

 

 

Dave is pouring gasoline on your rose bushes. Dave was raised in Texas.

 

==>Kanaya: File a complaint.

 

 

“I am upset, Dave. I will be less upset when you take your hands off my topiary.”

Dave has misplaced his atrocious eyewear. His grimace is even more awkward without it. He does not meet your gaze, though this is nothing new, and continues to glug the foul contents of his truck’s gas tank onto your prize-winning Ingrid Bergman. You stare. He stiffens. His mouth tightens, pulse quickens. Breath catches and stagnates under his breast. You hear each strand of muscle squeeze.

“Nah,” he says. “I am disinclined to acquiesce to your blah-blah-blah. I am disinclined to your everything. I am so disinclined you could slick me up and I would just sit here, no incline at all.”

His rambling trails off. You settle into the silence; he doesn’t wear it well. Your roses are done for. Your chainsaw creaks against the wood of the railing. Because your werewolf is high-maintenance, you have not eaten tonight. Dave’s neck is so tense that a bare brush of your teeth against his carotid would snap the vein and curdle it into the curve of his jaw, the sweep of his neck.

Biting Dave is a thought unappealing at best. He does not look to have washed today; he would probably cry; Rose would not take it well; you do not really _want_ to. But if he sets your house on fire you will call Detective Crocker and put in a request for a restraining order, and then you will advise Dave he had best pray he have limbs left to be restrained by the time the detective arrives.

Your Ingrid Bergman now glows with the light from your kitchen window. It is magical. You strain a muscle in your jaw.

Before your desperate grip on your nearly spent patience slips, a hunch plays against the back of your teeth, and snags on your fang. You push it loose with the tip of your tongue.

 

 

“This is not how you are going to retrieve the cueball,” you say.

“Don’t care,” he mumbles, as though you tipped an urn from the mantelpiece and each clump of ash is another confession, “don’t give a shit. Don’t want it, keep the fucking thing. It’s gonna burn with you, up in flames and smoke all stinking of BBQ wolf and bat flambe. Hope it brings you some satisfaction while you’re crispy-frying.”

He tips up the gas tank and brushes the plastic lip against the sodden petals of one formerly perfect rose. In a parody of a peace offering, he then stretches across the bush to balance the tank on the railing, inches from your knuckles.

“You wanna take this, get a good coat down on your porch for me?” he says. “I gotta get a lighter.”

You have learned that the cueball did, so far as Dave knows, fall into Karkat’s – hence your – hands. You have been reminded that you wish Dave’s wife left him gagged at all times.

The question remains, however, how the cueball got into Karkat. That is a terrible place for it to be. You don’t expect it to re-emerge. The details do not bear thinking about.

When you neglect to take the gas tank, Dave scoots it closer to your hand before jogging back to the truck. You call Detective Crocker.

 

==> **PHONE LOG:**

 

JANE: Ms. Maryam! Yes? Are you all right?

KANAYA: For the moment.

JANE: Oh dear, it’s not – there’s been an incident down by the lake. You’re not far. It’s not a… how shall I put this –

KANAYA: It is a man.

JANE: Oh, _good_.

KANAYA: It is Dave.

JANE: Oh, _bad._

KANAYA: I had expressed similar sentiments. There you are, Dave. I have Detective Crocker on the line. She would probably like to talk about your life and your choices.

JANE: What is he – Kanaya –

KANAYA: ...He says, and I shall quote, for I fear I am otherwise unable to isolate the essence of his meaning: Blow me. And – I’m sorry Dave, what? I don’t know what you’re talking about. …Some sort of cereal. …It does not taste like apple. He does not consider this apt material for an advertising campaign. It is, rather, ‘straight-up bullshit.’ --Detective, he wishes to distract me from the point, which is that he is either making an exceptionally poor attempt to drown me with his fuel tank, or he wants to set my house on fire.

JOHN: _What_?

KANAYA: Ah. John. Good. I am going to give Dave the phone. Please tell him not to mistake me for a wicker man.

JOHN: Uh, Kanaya, this doesn’t really sound like the time for hilarious movie references, also it was bees—

KANAYA: You are utterly lacking in culture.

JOHN: Okay cool but I’m not about to be set on fire OR become Nicolas Cage so why don’t you –

KANAYA: Yes, why don’t I. Dave, I would appreciate it if you took the fucking phone.

 

==>Kanaya: Eavesdrop.

 

 

Dave takes the phone, and takes it a distance. He leaves the second gas tank on the stairs of your porch. The shoulders of his silhouette cut a rigid darkness into your lawn. You don’t eavesdrop; you can pick out the path of a syllable across each mangled groove in Dave’s larynx at a distance of twenty meters. He has only gone ten. And in this first lick of a late September chill, the air holds an edge that can carry a whisper a mile.

It occurs to you that you have no idea what John is doing in Detective Crocker’s custody. You do not know where he would have left Rose.

Your elbows settle on the railing.

Dave’s voice, never gentle now, roughens against the border of an emotional riptide. On the other side of the line, John is frantic. John is frantic about Jade.

Jade is bleeding quite a bit.

Was bleeding.

Bled a lot.

Your stomach clenches, folds, collapses upon itself, and suddenly yawns with its own terrible gravitational pull. Your heart sinks into its hungry maw with devastating ease. You are not pleased with Dave; there are many wonderful things in your house that should not be on fire, including your leather-bound library, your herbs, your Jimmy Choos, and Karkat – monsters are resistant to a great many things, but you have found that fire is troublesome to most anything with skin.

You recall that Jade will wear what you buy her and that she will smile to see you and that she carries her gun at all times of night because she does not trust you more than she trusts a lion, a tiger, or a bear, all creatures which she knows, she understands, can be dressed as companions but lack the will to better their instincts. You think you understand what has happened, and you think tonight that Dave is melodramatic, but not crazy.

Across the lawn and an impassable dim, Dave’s breath deepens and rattles as he presses your phone to his ear. The heat in your head has mulled John’s electronic whisper into a pulsing murmur which you can no longer distinguish as meaningful.

That is until you hear first a sharp, stark silence and then the seize of Dave’s back and chest as John says, “waking up,” and that is really all there is left to say on the matter.

You are standing beside Dave before he finally lets go of the air trapped beneath his sternum. You put your empty hand on your phone and pull it down from his ear as deftly as a knife cuts through water. Your hand rests on his and you can feel his fear in the taut skin across his knuckles, but he is not afraid of you.

“Dave,” you say, gently, but firmly, as you would to a child drawing on your walls, “you are a monster.”

He laughs, low and full of corvidae. “No shit. What, you think that’s gonna get you some solidarity points? We’re gonna fist bump and I’m just gonna forget about all your bullshit because you and me get down with the sickness? Don’t try to pull that one-and-the-same shit with me, lady, I might deal in the dead but I don’t make them so let’s not even keep score.”

“And so I would not feel exceptionally bad about killing you.”

 

 

For just one moment, he goes still. It is a rare opportunity to see his eyes, horrible and bright, narrow at you in a glare he would not admit to. He tucks your phone back into your hand, blows a kiss from three inches away and four inches up, and turns to retrieve the fuel tank he left on your porch. You give him the keys to your station wagon.

 

==>Kanaya: Immediately regret giving Dave control over your material wealth.

 

 

He drives it as well as he eats in good company.

Your phone sits heavy in your hands. Your fingers tighten against the keys so they click into their grooves. The gasoline stench settles oily and thick into your nostrils, clouds your hair, your mind, your fears.

The only good thing about tonight is that the cueball is well out of anyone’s reach.

 

==>Seer: Reach.

 

What for? An explanation? A burst of intuition? A punch line? Here’s one:

You followed the devilbeast.

 

 

hey i got a great idea  
were sharing those now right  
like with you and no lets just  
go  
you see that bad news  
i got my hand out  
gonna touch it  
get my shitty impulse control all up in its business  
so heres the new plan  
its so great  
were just gonna stop right here  
lay out our cute as fucking shit gingham blankets fuck lets straighten those corners aw shit yes thats the stuff  
have ourselves a little picnic  
its fucking panoramic  
say cheese  
man its dark in here  


Dark, yes, and silent as your fifth grade birthday party. You can’t even hear your footsteps. Gravel crunches under your bare heels, mottles cold and ache into your soles, but even straining your ears, you can pick no proof of your passage from the thrum in the air. The only sound is the crow, whining, and at times, if you hold it, guarded in your chest, then exhale, reluctantly, your breath.

You haven’t traveled for a long while, and never once across this barren internal landscape. You couldn’t, before the cueball. Before the cueball, this world had not yet burst into being. Before the cueball, your waking feet were drawn across the country as if by magnetic force, or perhaps a wicked nostalgia, to distant landmarks carved as false memories into your mind. One minute you would lie burrowed under three blankets and twice as many textbooks, the next, you stood shoeless in Ohio, Kansas, Ontario, Louisiana, and always witness to the birth of a beast. Hungry creatures, monsters all, summoned you by their intent, and you manifested at their awakening like a pale Hollywood joke. Before the cueball, you were not a seer. You were a harbinger. Drawn on winds of ill-fortune, you went where your gut guided you, with little room for your conscious mind to interfere and suggest taking a break for a burger.

Since acquiring your circus show accoutrement, you had been able to turn your gaze inward and explore the map of your-mind-your-ability. You examined the lay of misfortune under the light of a brilliant sun. No longer did you lose yourself to the siren tide.

That your internal world was a desolate blight lit by an incandescent, murderous sphere did not surprise you. You don’t look to yourself as an example of the rich emotional tapestry of the human experience. For the years preceding the cueball you had become something of a one-trick-pony. A single chord of devastation, isolation; an echo. You haven't bothered to build much out of the debris, but what company has come to settle beside you has not been chased away.

Not successfully, in any case.

come on hold up  
potty break time  
no good place to pop a squat gonna have to turn around

  


 

The crow does not have a monopoly on the role of fussy metaphorical companions. The whisper, the breath, the breeze wanders sporadically. It nags, but by and large you welcome it.

This must be where you advise against the pursuit of spectral canids.  
nope.  
What an alarming disregard for my personal safety.  
haha, you know me. i’m just here to follow you.

You couldn't wouldn't won't ask it for more.

 

 

heads up lady  
weve got tminus ten on company  
were dropping in like were hot  
which great  
you are  
sizzling hot  
on fire

  


 

This is the desolate heart of the sun, the absurd, inverse darkness where it ought to rest. In the absence of light, you had expected an unfiltered void. Instead, the darkness sprawls out from the crater like a seeping cancer, and the far-off, sourceless light flags under its umbral advance.

 

 

Also that fellow looks like he's been waiting for you.

 

 

The smile wears tight on your mouth. You don’t usually bother, in here. But you’d rather not entertain company underdressed.

 

 

He stands to greet you. The devilbeast is nowhere in sight.

Welcome back, Seer.

You’ve been here once before. You found your birth in the searing heart of the currently truant sun. It burnt you to a crisp. Fire does not do well by your skin.

This guy is new.

I seem to have left you waiting. My apologies. I didn’t expect to become a guest in my own mind.  
Anticipation is not your strong point. Do sit down. We have much to discuss, and you’re very tired.  
Do we now.  
Of course. Our exchange will be most illuminating. As elucidation is the sole purpose of your sojourns into the interior, this suits your needs perfectly. And as you can see, I am well equipped to guide your way in darkness.  
Poetic.  
I won’t bore you.  


You doubt it; you sit anyway.

And what is it you’ll be telling me about?  
I’ll tell you very little.  
That sounds enlightening.  
It is, from positions both retrospective and panoptic.  
Omniscient?  
Hardly. Perspective. Shared in common with, say, a bird.  
cant see shit captain  
To no one’s surprise. You’re no more seer than I, Dave. Except in the most descriptive sense of the word.  
not dave  
Haa haa.  
I’ll assume by your evident habit of wordplay that your lack of ‘telling’ means we’re about to engage in a migraine-inducing puzzle of a conversation. In which case, I would like a sandwich first.  
Are you hungry?  
Famished.  


You are. You're always hungry, in here.

Were you but one fact further in the know, you would immediately rescind your request.  
Oh?  
Why don't you ask?  
Ask what?  
What's on your mind?  
Don't you mean what's in my mind?  
Couldn't you be more specific?  
What is your name?  


He tells you.

  
Mr. Scratch.  
Doctor, actually.  
Cute.  
Charming.  
You assume my knowing that you're named for - or have taken the name of - a New England manifestation of the Christian devil would deter me from taking you up on any offers. If I believed your name had any significance, I'd certainly avoid accepting food. That's generally understood as a misguided practice. But, I am not particularly Christian. And it's a name. Nothing more.  
You only say that because you like to argue. You know better than to dismiss the contextual weight of any moniker, especially if you suspect it was adopted.  
Nice. Ambiguous.  


It is. Circuitous. He speaks in circles and deliberately winds you down a path at the end of which he offers his name rather than his definition. Not that you expected forthrightness, or even the ability to outline his existence in rigid boundaries - everything in your dream is patently metaphorical. Circumstance forces you to accept that his name is of some import.

Is this where we strike up our symbolic fiddle war?  
To no conclusive end. I play only so well as you do.  
Because you’re a figment of my imagination.  
Am I?  
At least in part.  
What part?  
This again?  
What do you mean?  
Don’t you find it tiresome?  
Why should I?  
Will you tell me where the sun has gone?  
Isn’t it obvious?  
Would I ask if it were?  
What’s the last thing you remember?  
Don’t you know?  
What would be the harm in saying it anyway?  
Do you think I want to lose this game?  
This is a game?

  


 

The cueball.  
Is that all?  
It was stolen.  
Was it now?  
At the risk of sounding weary: duh. I wasn’t in full possession of my mental faculties.  
Weren’t you? Where do your faculties end and your abilities begin? Are they really so separable? Aren’t you ruled by your compulsion?  


His wording is specific, recalling your own. Just another aspect of him being YOUR aspect.

Compulsion.  
As with monsters.

  


 

Which you are now defining me as being one among.  
Oughtn't I. Your gift surely excludes you from the popular definition of humanity.  
Definitions are not decided democratically.  
Definition prescribes meaning. Meaning lies at the heart of all attempts at communication, the grasping thereof being the ultimate aim of any given exchange. In order to attain meaningful discourse, definitions must be mutually agreed upon. How is that anything less than a mandate of people?  
And now you’re facetious. I am monstrous, if this is what I do to entertain myself.  
Am I you? Are you so certain?  
A warped extension, I’ll grant, but you find your source in me.  
True enough.  
…Yet I’m missing something.  
Also true.  
What are you trying to tell me?  
I will tell you nothing you don’t already know.  
What are you trying to make me understand?

  


 

Perhaps there is no answer. Perhaps I only want you to question. What am I? What is your feathery friend? What is the devilbeast? What is the whisper? What are we but voices in the dark of your mind? You are a seer. The cueball amplified your ability, or at the very least your ability to control it to some respectable degree. Are we truths you have uncovered, or manifestations of yourself reaching out across a space as you explore it? Why, the possibilities are endless.  
what whisper  
hey lady whats he talking about  
im not fucking dave do i look like that asshole  
we should leave mother of pearly fucks we shouldnt be here  
They are nevertheless united under one common theme: you search out monsters, you isolate the incidence of their monstrosity, and you translate the inevitable into an action which will grant you mastery of their wicked happenstance. Your purpose is clear, though ambiguity clouds the medium of your process. You are driven. Compelled.  
Or just queasily moral.  
No.  
Wow. Thank you.  
You’re welcome.  
fuck fuck fuck somethings coming  
And I am a monster because I choose to make use of this mess in my mind.  
You didn’t choose it, and you are ruled by it, as much as any monster is ruled and bounded by their wretched code.  
Then what is my mandate?  
You are searching.  
no  
For what?  
its here  
That is dependent entirely upon you. But for the sake of your penchant for puzzle-solving, I will amend the question to better suit the circumstance – searching for _who_?

  


 

==>Rose: Wake up.

 

Not now!

 

 

Goddamnit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Work got way busy for me! Summer break has come so hopefully we'll get out the next couple of chapters with somewhat greater alacrity.
> 
> ALSO: Hi to everyone in the comments! I'm probably gonna start talking to you even if you first commented a month ago, because I'm way awkward like that! Whee!
> 
> -Odradek


	5. ACT I Quelle Horreur: Scene 5

==>Rose: Rise up.

 

Sitting you can manage; a true rise might take a moment. First, you must recover from the ocular assault of the wallpaper. As a child you theorized that this room had been appointed by Jackson Pollock’s love affair with Pepto-Bismol. Later, you supposed it the fault of the first waif to fall into your mother’s clutches. Only a five-year-old’s meticulously lacy sensibilities could account for the decor: amicable kittens, depicted in faux Chantilly Elysium.

However, as the years wore on even your most dedicated investigation through attic-stuffed photo albums uncovered no trace of your predecessor. There had been no child before you. You settled on the uneasy conclusion that Roxy’s tragic adventures in interior decorating were, in fact and deed, an attempt to appeal to your sensibilities.

Upon this flustered pubescent epiphany - Roxy cared, had taken you in out of something quite other than scientific curiosity - Jane had patted your cheek, squeezed your shoulder, and sat you down for a healthy dose of red velvet and film noir. Six hours of grim fables later, you eased into calling her Nana. It took you another six months to afford Roxy a ‘Mom.’

Few PhD candidates settle for adoption in lieu of graduation. You were sure you should have been grateful. You set to fulfilling your debt with the same dedication you had once reserved for sneaking into forgotten corners to uncover well-buried reams of your parents’ pictures. You wore pink and learned to knit. You excelled in biology, and eked your way into other scientific honors. You developed wit, made friends with girls, and learned to braid their hair (it was, in any case, nice hair).

You boiled and churned within the confines of obligation.

On the night your mother found you squinting through dust and darkness at the old shadows of her dead sister’s face, she offered you a perfectly irresponsible mimosa. You stubbornly gagged your way through it as she curled up next to you on your skirt-swept patch of splintering floorboards. She apologized for being horrible, terrible: at parenting, at grieving, at being an adult, for you. Her shoulder pressed against yours and she settled a kiss on your forehead. She cut you deeply. For all that she is soul-searingly brilliant, you don’t think she knows.

The dragging weight of her commitment left you so thoroughly drowned that you cannot to this day wear pink without squirming. At this moment, trapped in the bowels of the house you grew up in, specifically the clinic that constitutes its bottom floor, you are liable to break out in psychosomatic hives. The deepest irony of calamine lotion is its color. In order to escape, you must first rouse your anchor.

John is drooling on your knee. You admire him for his gentlemanly qualities.

You clear your throat. John sounds as though something is stuck in his, and does not otherwise twitch.

You lean forward to murmur in his ear. Your voice has gone sour with the bile of an unintended hangover; you sound like Dave. “Dear steward of my maidenly virtues.”

John snorts, but lacks the consciousness to be awarded a star for sarcasm. Never you mind: he’s always giving his away to the other children.

“Today a fellow of heretofore sterling moral character impressed his nose against the most scandalous groove of my kneecap.”

“Ugh. Rose?”

“Please advise as to his intent and the culturally acceptable reply.”

 

 

John peels himself clear of your comforter, then puts on a face that suggests yours has much in common with a Picasso. “Wow, you’re _green_.”

“Am I?” Your head pounds, and your stomach clenches in queasy syncopation. “Hm. Bucket.”

Someone left one waiting for you within arm’s reach of your keeper. John thrusts the bucket into your arms bare moments before you begin to helplessly retch.

What you expel is at least partially green. If you are not yet completely mad, you spy a tepid glow.

“You are so gross right now.” John takes your bucket and replaces it with a glass of water. “Here. This stuff is the shit, you have got to try it.”

As you sip, John dithers over where to dispose of your vomit. Your back is sore and you cannot arrange yourself comfortably. He abandons the bucket in the hallway. Hardly the most unfortunate calling card you have ever produced.

“A salt tang,” you say as he sits again. You inspect the glass against the fluorescent light as if it will prove to be imitation sympathy. “Were you crying?”

He rubs his eyes free of grog and nods as sincerely as he is able. “Uh, _yeah_. I know how to make your tea. Two sugars and a dash of manly tears. Feminism.”

You roll the lip of the glass along your mouth and drink the rest. “I am all right, you know.”

“Right. Okay. Are you?” asks John.

Concern is written so plainly in the squint of his eyes and wrinkle of his frown that for a moment you ache to tell him the truth. That there is a man in your head who you don’t know, that a ghost of a wolf drew you deep into the heart of an absent sun, that you have been burnt alive and born anew, that Dave is dead and lives in the echoes of your psychic searching.

John knows Dave died, but doesn’t know that Dave is still dead. Neither does Dave. It would unsettle John to know. Once he did, Dave wouldn’t be long in the dark; Dave would lock himself in a bathroom and descend into squawking madness. You think Jade might suspect, but she accepts a great deal more than you think she should.

Instead you say, “As right as can be expected post-drugging.”

And John says, “Yeah, about that.”

And you say, “His name is Karkat.”

And he says, “Who?”

“The werewolf.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“What happened to Jade?”

John’s hands draw vague thoughts through the air and culminate in a shrug. “Well. She’s okay.”

“And yet.”

“Doc says she’s going to be okay.” John has haplessly cycled through ‘Mrs. Lalonde,’ ‘Mrs. Rose’s Mom Number One,’ ‘Mrs. Doctor Lalonde,’ and never found his way to first-name basis. You doubt his current disconcertion is due to his never-ending fumble with authority figures. He rubs the back of his neck. “There was a lot of blood. I have never had to clean up that much blood before, which is kind of saying something with us. And I am pretty sure it stained, because I did not think to google how to get enormous swampy bloodstains out of carpets. But, okay, the thing is, Jade, she is… she’s still anemic now, but, this is weird, there, hm. There is no wound.”

You click your tongue and breathe out between clenched teeth. That certainly explains the devilbeast.

“So. Jade might be a werewolf now.”

“I can certainly foresee that being a problem.”

“Hey now, hold the phone, let’s not freak out and call up the FBI just yet, I say we’ve got duct tape, determination, a trunk for hookers, and a good chance of getting this problem all patched up before we gotta go crying to Mulder and Scully.”

Dave possesses all the emotional subtlety of a teenager’s diary. He leans against the door frame, as always both hesitant and needy. Your mother’s beachwear sunglasses do not suit his complexion. When you raise your brows, he tilts his chin up in a stubborn imitation of Dirk.

“By which of course I mean _thank you_.” His gravel-thick voice is down on its knees, hands clasped fervently together. “Thank you for making my wife a furry, Rose, you’ve fulfilled her dreams in a way I never can hope to match. The minute she regains coherence I’m seeing her hop-skip-jumping down to City Hall to file for a divorce so she can come running back to yiff you with the force of a thousand internet fantasies.”

“Dave.” John is never going to stop Dave with a warning tone. You wonder when he’ll learn.

“But who am I to whine? Exotic hairy ethnic woman ravishes albino lesbian psychic.” You wonder if he’s trying to offend or just hysterical. “That shit’s hot. That’s niche. We’re in fucking business now.”

“ _Dave_.” John waves a hand and shakes his head. “Dude. Shush your breasts. Soothe your boobs. You will always be first wife. I know this, in my heart.”

Unfortunately for John, Dave is a suicidal snowball in hell, and you are the three-headed masticating core of Dante’s Inferno. When tensions fly, as they are wont to when you make it your business to hunt down monsters and lie about it to the rest of the world, Dave will dart you a glance, a do-you-dare, and never in your life have you backed down. Certainly not from monsters, be they in your mind or simply Dave.

Dave very pointedly does not fidget. “My tits are motherfucking placid, man, relax, they’ve hit the spa, they’ve had a drink, they’re tipping back a bottle of barbiturate bliss.”

You tap your fingers on your glass. “How perfectly catatonic.”

“Shit let’s be vegetables.”

“I will lie back and think of brain death.”

Dave’s shoulders raise half a centimeter and his mouth, if anything, pities. “Brain death? Well fuck me gently and call me pumpkin, how much of that shit did you drink?”

Your throat squeezes with disquiet. But judging from John's still silent frown, and Dave's harried but unpanicked stare, you seem to be the only one experiencing visual hallucinations. An after effect of the drug or the visions? Time will tell. You tighten your smile and shrug more fully. “Enough, apparently.”

“Is this your new hobby?” Dave has given into himself, leaning forward, shoulders hunched up in pale imitation of his non-Euclidean wings that only you can see. “The vampire ain’t doing it for you anymore, you gotta call the werewolf hooker hotline and order up a brand new breed of bad idea? How much extra was the drug kink? Did you think about the consent of everybody else involved before or after he went ten foot beasty and oh, shit, you got the sudden realization that this isn’t one of your weird ass romance novels ‘cause this ship has veered into the harbor of Jade’s internet porn?”

“All right, guys, I have an idea.” John looks from you to Dave and back again with the hunted air of a man wearing a red shirt in space. “We have now entered the era of ‘I feel’ discussions.”

For only a moment, you purse your lips. “I feel that my hand moved less by my will and more by the influence of the cueball.” Your thumbs streak faint arcs against the side of your empty glass as you nestle it between your knees. “I have a great deal of powerful emotions regarding the probability that this theft was inevitable.”

Dave raises his hand and looks pointedly at John. He doesn’t speak until John catches on, nods, and subsequently buries his face in his palms. “I feel,” says Dave, “that you need to fucking tell us when you’re being manipulated by inanimate objects. I got so many god damned feels about inanimate objects and your creepy crystal ball is flinging itself to the top of the list.”

“I am overwrought with the sensation that I simply cannot comply with your request, given the covert and covering nature of the manipulation. I am furthermore verklempt to acknowledge that I knew I would not die.”

“I feel that you didn’t know a damn thing about Jade’s tango with ten fuck-off feet of death.”

“I feel as though she is not dead either.”

“I feel like you didn’t know she wouldn’t be.”

“I feel that you are being quite pessimistic, all things given.”

“I feel that you are missing your goddamn sense of self-preservation, Lalonde, and that lack of give-a-fuck is oozing over the rest of, clogging up all the not-stupid parts of your brain. And I could make a powerpoint on my feelings about your eldritch Cullen girlfriend being a crazy fucker deputizing werewolves and sending them out to burgle RVs and assault women.”

 

John throws his arms over his head. “I feel shut up! I feel that you are both _dicks_. I feel that I am really sorry I ever said ‘I feel.’ I am sorry I feel anything. I am sorry anyone feels, you are both terrible, shut up.”

You raise your glass to your lips. You had forgotten there is nothing in it. You slip it back between your knees and run the tip of your pointer finger around the rim as John makes a horrid face at Dave, who mimes zipping his own mouth closed.

John rolls his eyes. “Okay, so it looks like Kanaya tried to steal the cueball.”

“I know,” you admit. The glimpses you caught in your exchange with Scratch suggested as much. You aren’t sure whether or not you’re relieved. Kanaya is not the first to attempt to take the cueball from you, though until today you’d had no inkling she desired to do so. Whether her meddling is preferable to that of prior thieves is debatable.

After all, aside from nearly killing John, the last one was not ultimately successful.

Perhaps Dave is correct. Perhaps your track record has become unsettling. Perhaps he has room to talk, behind his sunglasses and with the deep ragged knots in his throat. John has always been too kind to blame you for the ill-luck that follows you home, but Dave lays fault at your doorstep like a dead thing. Your dead supper. Your nearly-dead John.

Clearly caught by the same memory but unwilling to dwell, John points at Dave. “Dave tried to set her on fire. Kanaya told Detective Crocker she wants a restraining order! I would too! You’re kind of a creep, Dave.”

“Right in the self-esteem.”

“Whatever!” John elbows Dave’s hip. “Detective… Your Other Mom told Kanaya it would ‘take a while,’ which sounded like Crocker-speak for ‘I am going to hope you forget you said that.’ For now she has put Dave under house arrest, where ‘house’ is flexibly defined as ‘wherever I am currently baking molasses cookies to feed to your anemic wife, and never within twenty miles of the woman you tried to immolate ten hours ago.’”

Your chest tickles. A perverse coil under your sternum wants to congratulate Dave for taking the initiative. The rest of you clouds around that spring, gums up the promise of violence so the tension bleeds into the whole of your being, a low-level whine no longer sharp enough to release. You pulse with sullen curiosity. Why did Kanaya steal the cueball? Why did she send a werewolf to do it? And why, oh why, did the cueball see fit to deliver itself into her possession?

With the cueball out of your hands, and the vomit out of your stomach, your head has begun to burn. First it prickles outward from your temples, then sweeps slow and concentric across the planes of your brow to stagnate and ferment between your eyes. Soon the flames of prophecy will consume the better part of your judgment. Then the empty craters in your frontal lobe will flood with a monstrous compulsion, and you will go, go, go until you have sighted your quarry, whether it be a murderous ghost in Louisiana, or a ravenous shadow in the Northwestern woods, or a blight with wings slanting between Indiana corn rows. Without the cueball, you cannot pick and choose your prey. You are at the mercy of whatever vision screams the shrillest.

Your shoulders shiver, a myoclonic twitch that ripples the hazy pool of your distraction. “I would like an envelope,” you say, and count your requests on your fingers, “some stationery, preferably printed, two pens, at least one of which glitters, and a dash of antiseptic to perfume the missive.”

John stares at you in abject consternation. Dave digs through his pockets and produces a sharpie. He was probably going to draw on your face.

You flick your wrist at Dave. “Oh, but I’m feeling quite faint. Might I recruit a stenographer?”

Dave uncaps the sharpie with his thumb, bunches up the sleeve of his hoodie, and makes to take notes on his arm.

You raise your hand and tsk. “Caution, Strider. We’re sending word to Ms. Maryam. Scribble not on anything you are unwilling to part with.”

“All right, I got this.” Dave takes up John’s arm instead.

“What? No. Aaah. Get off.” John dislodges Dave only once a surprisingly detailed vagina dentata has been rendered on the back of his hand. Dave is branching out. John shakes his hand as if Dave’s artistic endeavors can be shed as easily as a spider web. “Wow, or we could go talk to Kanaya! About how… you are actually probably not going to get the cueball back. Not immediately, anyway. On account of her werewolf having eaten it.”

Words escape you.

Dave points at your face with the sharpie. “Tell him why that’s not a problem.”

Between the way his fingers grow black and his cuticles twist into claws, you cannot bring yourself to agree. Life without the cueball will be despairingly short on the attribute of realness.

==>Rose: Strategize.

 

If you had the time. Being bed-ridden, even temporarily, turns out to be quite the preoccupation. You are visited by first one mother, then other, then both, bearing gifts. Your Mom has bedazzled your bottle of antiemetics, and tied a florid lavender ribbon around a plastic bottle of water. Your Nana explains that the water was once Jack Daniels, which she will re-dispense once you are properly hydrated. The Get Well Soon card comes with a “Stranger Danger” pamphlet and a plateful of snickerdoodles.

Mom knows about the werewolf; you haven’t lied to her about supernatural shenanigans since you brought Dave in, post-possession by spectral death crow, his throat a tattered mess, his eyes a zoological affront to nature. Mom swears to gog she won’t sell Jade to science. Meanwhile, from the way Nana says ‘bear,’ and ‘rabies,’ you suspect that she is well aware of the bullshit quotient in the cover story. She probably does not truly believe you invited a grizzly into your home, or that Jade was mauled by anything rabid in the clinical sense of the word. But she has always been reluctant to admit your little camera crew gets up to business outside the typical scope of normal. You have asked her frankly in the past. She has said, “The legal aspect is tricky, have another cupcake,” and you have generally left it alone after that.

Jade stumbles in on their retreat, and plops herself into a chair to warble out a confused warning about the homeless, and that you need to be more careful, and that if it is heterosexual experimentation you are looking for, she will happily lend you Dave. You remind her gently that the trial period with John had all the sexual spark of one dead fish slapping another. Different strokes, Jade notes, and goes on to note that she would have that fish for dinner and in all permutations of compromising sushi arrangements.

“I’m worried about you, Rose,” Jade confesses at length. She has drawn her knees up to her chin, and her glasses have found their way to your bedside table.

“I appear to have emerged from this incident unscathed,” you say, emphasis on ‘I.’

Jade snorts a giggle as though it were cocaine. She bares her smooth brown neck for you to see. Not even a hint of a scar. “And that means I’m super,” she says. “You, though…” She yawns and frowns as if to apologize for having bled enough to die twice. “I’ll be better in, I’ll be better in soon. You have to get – I know you know you have to get it back, but you have to, Rose.”

She takes your limp hand in hers and squeezes, though not strongly. Her words slur together as she fights the need to sleep. “It’s not a curse. It never was. I know I don’t really remember, but I do, enough, because we did... When we found you, Rose, that was _terrible_. Half the time I thought you were dead. Like I’d blink and you’d be a ghost, or a joke, just, something gone. And I know we only had you like that for like, a week, before the cueball, and I know Dave thinks the cueball’s just flat-out fucking awful, but Rose, he’s _really dumb_.”

She brushes her lips against your palm, then holds it to her cheek. She smiles two ways and you are rather unfond of the second. You choose not to ruin the moment and keep it to yourself.

Your fingers cringe lightly against Jade's jaw. You almost apologize.

Jade shushes you and says, “If you say you're sorry, I will punch your invalid nose! It's okay, Rose. We're going to be okay. I just, I want you to get the cueball, I want it back. When you had it, you filled in. Like someone colored in your lines. And I don’t care how many times I get bitten, or how many of my toes get eaten, or _whatever_ , it’d be worse to see you scraped out hollow again.”

==>Rose: Doubt.

Constantly. When you close your eyes, the burn blooms all the brighter. A magnetic curl unfolds from your brow and toward the horizon. You must retake the cueball before the hideous flower blossoms in full, and you are harnessed to a beacon of misfortune that drags you howling to its side. Before, at least, your metaphors become any more mixed.

Jade falls asleep by your bed, Dave carries her back to hers, and John comes to get you an hour before sundown. Too buzzed on psychic aggravations to think, you still have no idea what you’re going to do when you see Kanaya. Punching has occurred to you. Dave recommends hitting the werewolf with Kanaya’s station wagon, but this time from behind, in hopes that this will send the cueball flying back the way it came. To explain, he rambles something about ‘physics’ in place of ‘logic.’

“Equal opposites attract,” says Dave, filing his nails behind the reception desk. He sounds very learned. On your way out the door, he tosses a can of pepper spray to John, with which to ‘referee the courtship rituals of the damned.’

John laughs it off, but squirrels the can away in his jacket. In Kanaya’s station wagon, he confesses that Dave earlier tried to equip him with a butterfly knife. “But Detective Crocker was like _right there_ , and they are kind of illegal, so I pretended Dave was coming on to me and said it was super inappropriate.”

He looks as sick as you felt on waking. You can count twenty reasons why, and you think all of them might be right.

By the time you and John pull up to Kanaya’s house the crepuscular hour has sunk into black, and the nauseating buzz at the back of your mind has grown to a static roar. An endless wall soars up over the reach of your senses and for a devastating second all you know is the crash and foam of a vicious white noise. Your temples pound, sweat slicks down the back of your neck, and you hesitate to leave the car. John says something you don’t understand. You squeeze out a single husky, “Ha,” which he mistakes for genuine. He snorts, pokes your arm, and leaves you in the station wagon to go examine his truck.

As you gather yourself under the guise of invading the privacy of Kanaya’s glove compartment, John valiantly attempts to catalogue the evils done to his truck by Dave’s idea of guerrilla warfare.

When you can breathe without shuddering, you slip out of the car and slam the door shut, anything to cut through the lingering yawn enveloping your inner ear. John looks up, drums his fingers on the truck’s crumpled metal hood, and concludes, “It’s kind of fucked. Dave sucks.”

If you do not find the cueball, he will never have the money to fix the truck. You cannot be artfully dour for the camera when you are rambling barefoot through two feet of snow. A cloying heat pools at the back of your skull. You rub it away.

John has dug the tool kit out from under the truck’s front seat.

“You can’t bring a hammer, John. That’s rude.”

“I’m just saying. I would be really upset if you came out of this bleeding.”

“Kanaya has never bitten me.”

John grimaces. “I know. And I like her! I do. I just, ugh, I guess it turns out I’m a terrible judge of character, so, I’m not super jazzed about either of us gallivanting around in the vampire’s lair unarmed.”

You take the hammer. John brings his camera. There is no one in screaming distance but for the two of you, a vampire, and the werewolf who answers the door. He does this before you even have the chance to knock, skillet in hand and scowl on his face.

 

==>SCRIPT LOG:

 

 

KARKAT: Fuck off, piss-lickers. We don’t want any.

ROSE: Aha, now we’re interested in obtaining consent. Unfortunately, I still don’t have anything I want to give you.

KARKAT: Peachy. Then pack up your home improvement kit and get the fuck off my lawn.

JOHN: Whoa. Kanaya. You look terrible.

KARKAT: Ha ha ha, yes, I _am_ the hysterical vampire, and your fuck-minded belief that you are wearing appropriate colors offends the very core of my being, so you really have to leave before I rearrange your body parts into a more pleasing configuration.

JOHN: Hysterical? Geez, way to sexism. Never fashionable, actually.

KARKAT: Your stinging barbs lance poison into my soul. I am wounded. I bleed. Ow.

JOHN: Hahaaaa, you’d be funny if you weren’t awful. Which you are, incidentally.

KARKAT: Did you hear that? The empty silence suffocating the night? It was the sound of all the loveless fucks I give,  sliding into marital decay.

JOHN: Hm. Not sure if that one worked, buddy.

ROSE: John, I trust it hasn’t escaped your notice that this is Karkat. While antagonizing him may be fun, I can’t say there is any profit to be had.

JOHN: I dunno, I feel better. Hey Karkat, you’re weird looking.

KARKAT: Your face is weird, crudfucker.

JOHN: Oh no, my feelings! Whatever, dude. You’re just kind of pocket-sized. And of human proportion. And alive. It’s a surprise.

KARKAT: What?

ROSE: What?

JOHN: Well, you know, cueball. Yea big? And stomach? Not so big. I have done the math, it does not add up.

ROSE: Presuming it hasn’t already been expelled.

JOHN: Yeah, ew. I just… wasn’t really expecting to see some guy. Who may or may not be digesting a mystical artifact of unknown origin.

KARKAT: Way to make me want to tear my own ears off and boil them in bleach. So shut up and let me do the talking – do you see that fence back there? Over by the road. That is an _indicator_ , it shows that you have crossed the border between public and private property, and now by constitutional right of this godforsaken country, I am morally obligated to paint the rosebushes with your insides.

ROSE: I would advise against staking claim on the moral high ground, Mr. Vantas. There’s an awfully slippery slope.

KARKAT: I would advise _you_ to turn around, walk a hundred feet, and sit.

JOHN: That’s the highway.

KARKAT: No, it’s Narnia, _go_.

JOHN: Dude, Narnia’s inside, everybody knows that.

KARKAT: Get. Lost.

ROSE: Am I in error to assume Kanaya wanted to speak with me? Or is that why she sent you to menace my friends and steal my property in place of doing the deed herself? And here I thought it a cry for attention.

KARKAT: What am I, her therapist? How should I know?

ROSE: You must know something, given your insistence that we leave.

KARKAT: …

JOHN: Hey—

JOHN: Whoa – Rose! What the hell!

KARKAT: _Fuck_ —hhgk.

ROSE: I will leave on only two conditions, Mr. Vantas. One, that I have spoken with Kanaya. Two, that I have the cueball. My fate lies in your hands.

KARKAT: One, _fuck you_. Two, fuck no. Congratulations! You’re completely off your nut. All the other psychopaths are jealous. How does she do it? Maybe it’s Maybelline, maybe it’s her born ability to burst into tears and sodomize puppies.

JOHN: Eegh. Wow, okay, Rose, get off the werewolf, you don’t know where he’s been!

ROSE: You opened the door. You didn’t wait for us to knock. Either you’re an  exceptionally poor tactician, or you didn’t want to be left alone with, as you phrased it, the hysterical vampire. I assure you, I do not especially want to leave you alone with her either.

KARKAT: …She’s. She’s kind of fucked up.

ROSE: Goody.

 

JOHN: Oh my god are you okay—

KARKAT: Back off, turdwrangler!

JOHN: Shit, I’m sorry.

KARKAT: _Sorry_? Are you _shitting_ me?

JOHN: She’s not usually like this!

KARKAT: Like what, off her ten thousand goddamn _meds_? Fuck you, get back here—

JOHN: Wait – Rose – whoa, all right, ‘she’s kind of fucked up,’ that’s not exactly an endorsement? Rose – _wait_ –

 

JOHN: All right, here’s a nice, heavily fortified door, that is also locked. Okay. That’s okay. I saw couches in the living room. We could sit on those! And wait. And drink Kanaya’s fanciest wine! Out of coffee mugs! That would show her.

 

 

JOHN: Ohhh jesus –

KARKAT: Son of a shitweasel, that was not an invitation to vandalism, fuckwench!

 

 

ROSE: There you are. You rang?

KANAYA: I. Did no such thing.

ROSE: …Perhaps unintentionally.

JOHN: What? Oh. Oh, shit, Rose, you didn’t say –

KARKAT: What? Say what? What the fuck didn’t she say?

JOHN: Oh my god do you have any idea what’s going on – _Rose do not close that door_.

 

 

 

“Noooo.”


	6. ACT I Quelle Horreur: Scene 6

==>PHONE LOG: (texts)

 

 

JOHN: hey! the door locked.  
JOHN: yup, still locked.  
JOHN: rose please open the door  
JOHN: roooose  
JOHN: do you remember the last time you kissed kanaya?  
JOHN: i do!  
JOHN: it was a fucking disaster!  
JOHN: defenestration is no one’s cup of tea.  
JOHN: i mean unless you like that sort of thing? but you didn’t seem to!  
JOHN: rose open the door it is not worth it to touch a boob  
JOHN: you didn’t say it was seer stuff.  
JOHN: i might be freaking out a little

 

==>John: Freak out a lot.

 

Your name is JOHN EGBERT and you do not have a PROBLEM WITH KANAYA. You have a PROBLEM with the incredible likelihood that she EATS PEOPLE. Not that you’ve ever caught her at it! Not that you want to. Not that Dave hasn’t tried.

You once asked her if she was the GOOD KIND OF VAMPIRE. She placed a manicured hand on your cheek and said, “John, there are as many good vampires as there are good men.” You aren’t sure whether she was being facetious, feminist, or just plain pretentious, but you kind of noticed her total lack of an answer to your question. Also the not-so-subtle implication that the missing number in her half-assed cover was ‘NONE.’

Surprise surprise, you aren’t overjoyed to watch Rose lock herself in the creepy dead people basement with her vaguely-creepy mostly-dead somewhat-people somewhat-girlfriend.

Neither is Karkat, which is how despite your differences – which are plentiful and varied and include that you have never chewed through anyone’s neck – the two of you spend the next half-an-hour trying to break into a heavily fortified underground lair. You are not terribly successful. To be honest, you are complete failures. It is super difficult to break into anything when you are not excited about actually breaking it.

 

 

The only thing you succeed at doing is parking two of Kanaya’s most masculine chairs in front of the door and cracking open a six pack. Karkat is weird about this at first, until you point out that Kanaya does not drink beer, for which he calls you judgmental, to which you say, oh my god, dumbass, she’s a vampire, who do you think she buys the beer for? You leave Karkat to suss out the puzzle of your truce with [REDACTED]’s lean, mean, vampire queen and text Rose until your fingers are numb.

Karkat is quick to tell you to stop obsessing over the lesbians, because it makes you a complete hair-smelling, window-peeking creeper.

“This is important,” you insist, though you take a break to shake feeling back into your fingertips. “Them going at it is pretty much a harbinger! They are a sign of the apocalypse. Every time they mack, the skies darken, fish and frogs rain down from the heavens, two-headed calves are born speaking in tongues, and someone gets thrown out a window.”

“There are no windows in the basement, fuckwit.”

You roll your eyes. Obviously windows are your primary concern. They are a real pane in your ass! The beer buzz fizzles at the hazy edge of your nerves. More puns are coming in for a landing. You think Karkat will probably kill you.

Or, possibly, himself. He has that queasy look of Dave on airplanes and Jade when Dave is driving. Sympathy twinges under your ribcage, right next to your squishiest and most vulnerable parts. The skillet hasn’t left Karkat’s lap. He hunches over it like it’s the hobo trashcan fire that will keep him warm tonight. The bags under his eyes remind you of why, three years ago, you pulled over and piled Rose into your car.

“What?” Karkat bares his teeth, which are white and sharp as a shark’s or a nightmare’s, and nothing like a wolf’s.

You pocket your cellphone and shrug. “Nothing.” Something. A lot of somethings. Except now he’s staring at you like you just stapled your tongue to your nose and called it art and he just wants to know how the hell you’re even still pronouncing things correctly. “What?”

Karkat presses his mouth closed over his incredible teeth. His murky yellow stare flickers back to the basement door. “This is a thing they do?” he asks. “This is what they think qualifies as a relationship?”

“Enh.”

 

==>John: Sum it up.

 

Monsters flock to [REDACTED] like the world’s deadliest tourist trap. Running into new ones is a matter of course; it keeps your cameras rolling, and you in business.

 

 

You met Kanaya shortly after something slithered out of the campsite lake and tried to tear your feet off. Instead she cut its not-feet off with a chainsaw, which seemed impractical. But you weren’t about to argue! You had readily assumed she was some sort of fancy park ranger, armed to fight with foliage and swoop in to rescue hapless cameramen.  Rose was not so easily satisfied, especially not after Kanaya chanced upon your crew three more times in the space of two weeks, always to the tune of her chopping up something new, hideous, and hungry.

Rose didn’t like the ‘methodology’ of it all. Rose thinks you can save people. Kanaya does too, she just doesn’t think monsters count.

So on the one hand you had Rose bent over the cue ball all day and half the night trying to outwit Kanaya on one front and her depressing doom visions on the other. She wanted – she wants – with everything in her, to figure out how to save a person, or a monster that had once been a person, by giving it closure, or a cure, or by solving the riddle of its ‘compulsion.’ On the other hand you had Kanaya, whose thoughts on monsters boiled down to beheading the bastard and hiding the body.

Which apparently led to kisses?

Wait, says Karkat, what depressing doom visions? You say you don’t have the time to exposit on this any more than you already have! Rose is psychic, bluh bluh, end of story. It’s a pretty shitty deal all around though, because it’s less Nicolas Cage in Next and more the giant mess that is Akira. Sometimes Rose does things she doesn’t really want to. She’ll know it’s a bad idea, but she can’t stop herself. Like if you wanted pizza for breakfast so you got a pizza and then shot the delivery guy? Karkat says your metaphor is defective. You say it explains why Rose threatened him with a hammer, and you ask if he’s horked up the cue ball yet. He looks a little sick. You wonder if he’s about to be, and wish you had a bucket. He contains himself, and takes another drink.

 

 

Anyway, you say, the point is, one day you came home from a road trip with Dave’s eyes glowing and Kanaya freaked out enough to show her teeth. You really have no clue how Rose missed the teeth, given how familiar she’d become with the rest of Kanaya’s mouth, but it’s a weird truth that you never do catch a monster until it’s too late.

Welp, you said upon the revelation of Kanaya’s pointy canines, this sure does indicate some sort of deeply ingrained neurosis on her part. What kind of monster thinks the only way to deal with their own is wanton murder?

Karkat downs the rest of his beer.

 

==>John: Examine relevancy of tangent.

 

Monster though she may be, you don’t think Kanaya would hurt Rose. But then, you didn’t think Vriska would hurt you either and—

 

 

And you are fine. You breathe, you’re sore, on your side, kind of inside, but not, because you’re fine now, and duh, you’re not – it’s just – you’re okay, it’s

She didn’t want to. She said she didn’t. 

 

 

And you’re pretty sure you believe her. At least, you have decided to.

You’ve seen a lot of people do a lot of things that they cry a lot about later. Like Dave. Dave doesn’t cry but you almost wish he would. Dave hates that he looks at roadkill the way you look at cheeseburgers. Dave closes his eyes and holds his breath when you drive past graveyards. Dave had fucking _night terrors_ in college; Dave doesn’t dream anymore; it’s not even nothing, he says, it’s just black. Dave won’t talk about Rose’s ‘compulsions’ without making stupid rhymes.

If you call him on it, he pretends you’re the weird one and shakes his shoulders as if rearranging his feathers, and you just want to punch him in his stupid head until he thinks better, because you know in your gut there’s an ugly whisper in his ear. It’s just another shade of what wraps up Rose from her head to her feet, and then leashes her to the cue ball. She’s that kid on the playground who got tangled with the tether-ball. You guess you could argue about whether or not the urges can really be separated from the people having them, but it sounds like tricky bullshit to you. The fact is, it’s hard for you to be mad at anyone who doesn’t want to be what they are.

Which is why you’re not still mad at Karkat. Kind of. You don’t hate him, anyway.

He side-eyes you again like he’s waiting for another excuse to claim self-defense. You have met chihuahuas less likely to explode in aneurysms.

“Why didn’t you eat Dave?” you ask.

Karkat scowls as though you’ve touched him inappropriately on the face.

You feel this is unfair and so barrel on to the crux of the matter. “I guess what’s bothering me is, now that Jade’s a werewolf, how likely is _she_ to eat Dave?”

The scowl deepens. You bet it’s made children cry. “He’s a monster, jackass,” says Karkat to the skillet. “Monsters don’t eat monsters.”

You squint. “Is this some kind of monster bro-code we’re not in on? Because I’m going to be honest here, Dave’s whole thing was pretty much the opposite of informed consent. He was not given a manual.”

Even if he had been, Dave’s not big on the part where you read the instructions. Neither is Jade. Ikea furniture falls to you and Rose. It’s always a glorious clusterfuck of fiddly little wrenches and new swearwords and upside-down bookshelves, but you come out the other side without smashing anything.

Something twists a little in your throat. Rose is your project partner, your edit buddy, keeper of the grocery list to your pusher of the cart. You don’t pick favorites, how could you? But you hope Rose comes out of the basement soon.

“You are delusional,” says Karkat. His nose wrinkles. He continues to fail to look at you. “We’ll have a monster ‘bro-code’ the day I sneeze glitter and shit kittens. It’s just an aversion.”

“Like an allergy?”

“If an allergy can be likened to the crippling secondhand embarrassment that chokes me with shame every time you open your mouth, then yeah, exactly. Monsters are just… foul. I wouldn’t put my mouth on one if it had been slathered in buttercream frosting and heart-shaped sprinkles.”

“Ew.”

Karkat shifts in his seat and stares so hard at the ground that he is likely to get a migraine. You recognize the angle of his stiff shoulders: regret.

Your fingers squeeze around the bottle. You say, “You know it’s a good thing you didn’t eat him, right?”

Karkat grunts and you remember that Dave hit him with your truck. It is possible he doesn’t agree.

After a breath, you can hear an incoherent mumble bumbling into the walls of your brain. An idea. “So…” You set the bottle by your feet and balance your elbows on your knees, hands knotting together. “That’s why you went after Jade. Because she was human.”

“She had a gun,” says Karkat, as though you’re stupid.

Pressure builds beneath your eyes. You want to scream a little. Screaming never helps. You smile; that’s a trick you learned from Rose. “And _human_!” you say again. “Which she isn’t anymore. So you’re not likely to try and get all…” you mime great big pointy teeth, “with her throat again, right?”

Karkat makes a face like he’s just swallowed his tongue and is about to barf it back up.

“Gonna hope that’s a yes. Just for the record, not wanting to kill people? Okay by me! And, look, obviously there’s weird monster stuff that you’re up to date about, that we really aren’t. Like, for example, what Jade is going to want to chew on when her new monthly friend arrives. We cannot solve this one with tampons and ibuprofen! Why don’t you help her out with that?”

 

==>Karkat: Duly consider the surprisingly civil request.

 

[Land of Self and Loathing]

 

==>John: What is this guy’s deal?

 

You don’t know, but he’s been staring vacantly into space for a whole minute! It’s like he’s wrestling with some terrifying personal demons that he hopes will kill him before he has to talk with you again. And here you thought yourself somewhat charming.

You pop open another bottle of beer and clink the bottom against the skillet before pressing the sweating glass into Karkat’s palm. He tenses up and you pull back a little faster than you think is polite. You smile when he stares, and laugh. It sounds less than genuine, more like it was shoved out on stage to cover for an absent leading man.

“Just a thought,” you say.

“A pants-shittingly feeble one,” Karkat rasps. His fingers are tight around the bottleneck but he doesn’t raise it up to drink. “It’s like your brain pissed all over the carpet and wants validation for its stunning accomplishments. Were you suffocated in the womb?”

Technically, you do not hear a ‘no.’

You pull out Dave’s sharpie – he puts things in your pockets like a reverse magpie – and peel the paper label off of your beer. You scribble your number on the back, then your email address, and on the off-chance, your IM screen name.

“Here.” You hand your contact info to Karkat. He glowers at you like you’re trying to give him leprosy. “We’re going to be down in the Pine Barrens for a couple weeks,” you say, still holding it out, “I mean, if Jade’s all right. She seems to be! So, you should call me. And we should work out a, I dunno, a schedule, or something, so when the time for Jade to go mad with hunger under the full moon rolls around, we’re all on the same page. The page where you help us help her not eat anything like a people.”

You expect Karkat to tell you it’s not possible. But hey, he didn’t eat Dave, he only bit Jade, and he didn’t bite you at all! His track record is exemplary as far as you are concerned. Maybe one day you will give him a medal.

Instead he takes a deep breath and says, “What the fuck do you want to be in Jersey for?”

“Really?” You toe your camera out in front of your chair. “No?” You pick it up and wave it between you. “Wow. You have no idea who we are, do you.”

“What are, douchebags with cameras? Ding ding ding! I have won a prize.”

“Geez. You must be new here. And to the planet, maybe.” Your commercials blare obnoxiously from at least five channels. You have never been so proud to hear Dave scream repeatedly. “Do you live under a rock?”

Karkat snatches the paper from your hand and crumples it into his pocket. Victory is yours.

You celebrate by telling him what you’ll be doing in the Pine Barrens. Karkat is happy to tell you ten ways you’re an idiot for courting the Jersey Devil. You tell him you’d never court anything so quintessentially un-kosher. You mutually agree that humans courting monsters is doomed to end in soul-crushing failure and finish the beer staring at the still locked door.

You’re such a liar.

==>Rose: Have relationship with monster.

 

You do not have a relationship with Kanaya. Not in anything more than the most prescriptive sense of the word. You are two women whose interests intersect at regular antagonistic intervals. In no way can you be said to have a positive interpersonal alliance based on mutual respect and affirmation.

With all the grace and aplomb of a daycare attendant, Kanaya guides you down the steps. She keeps one hand wrapped firmly at the crook of your elbow, lest you should fling yourself in front of a passing vehicle. Any moment now, you will succumb to the most precocious tantrum. By the time you reach the second door at the foot of the stairs, your eyes have adjusted to the gloom, but your head has not quieted a mote.

Trapped first in your mind and now within the basement, the psychic screech has compounded. It scrapes its claws against the walls of Kanaya’s bedroom as she plants you in a chair. She leaves you there to echo as she sets an electric kettle for tea. You contemplate vomiting on the arm covers. You refrain, but only because you suspect your stomach would come up with the rest of it. Sickness has not so viciously dug its heels into your soul since you first laid hands on the cue ball.

Just before you decide to slide bonelessly out of the chair and bash your head against the floor, Kanaya puts a warm cup into your hands. “Thank you,” you say, and raise the cup to your lips. You pause before you drink. “Hm.” You lower the cup back to the saucer and tsk. “I should probably get this tested. Do you have a plastic bag I could borrow?”

Kanaya rests the tips of her fingers on your shoulder. “Flunitrazepam doesn’t grow on trees. Just how much money do you expect me to waste on drugging one person?”

She sits down across from you. The memory of Scratch drapes over the room like an old friend. Hunger squirms in your belly, wars with nausea. Heat articulates the shape of your bones. Your swollen tongue cannot conjure a retort. You drink your tea.

 

 

Kanaya crosses her ankles and frowns as though she feels she has lost. “I don’t see why you couldn’t knock.”

“I was overcome. My lust for your company knows no social convention.”

“You didn’t have to resort to extraneous hardware.” Her eyes fall on the hammer, positioned aesthetically on the coffee table. “A good whine would have sufficed.”

“I thought I could entice you with an appeal to your dramatic proclivities.”

“I would have been equally tickled had you languished over my dilly-dallying on a couch, upstairs, with your hands nestled deeply in your pockets.”

You pause with the lip of the cup touched lightly against your mouth. “Dilly-dallying? You mean to say you were aware you had kept me waiting?”

Kanaya’s brow twitches. Her lips purse, her eyes track down and left. She is a gifted pout. “As you can see, I am not yet dressed for company.”

You cant your head in acknowledgement, attention dipped back to your tea. Your fingers shake. You clamp them more tightly against the cup contours. “Karkat says you’re hysterical.”

That catches her. You glance up in time to glimpse the tightness by her eyes and the bare shrink of her shoulders against the back of her chair. “He is a very silly boy,” she says.

“Language!” The crown of your head might well break away from your skull. You are full to bursting of an unspoken certainty. You wet your tongue with tea to temper the inferno. You might as well spit on a bonfire. “What might have led him to so cockamamie a conclusion?”

Kanaya puffs a cheek. “Karkat is of delicate constitution.”

“How a more perfect minion could have fallen into your grasp, I simply cannot imagine. Wherever did you find him?”

“A truck stop.”

“The bargain bin.”

“The events of last night upset him.”

“What a pity.”

The way Kanaya’s fangs push into her lip only clutters the conflict in your breast. Hunger against queasy psychic reeling against that familiar singing want to slip your hand against her jaw and push her mouth up to meet yours. The unease in her stare sours your impulse. What is she after? Why has your head brought you here? __

Kanaya breathes out through her nose, which you have come to recognize as a nervous habit. “He did not mean to bite Jade,” she says, with the lingering silent addendum: I did not want him to.

“Ah,” you say, “what a relief. His dental intentions left me fraught. Now that I know he didn’t mean to bite Jade, and that he was of such delicate constitution in a high-stress situation, I perfectly understand why you thought this would work out so well.”

Kanaya outright scowls. 15 – love. “His sensibilities are timid and warped, but his resistance to various… urges is truly remarkable.”

That is Kanaya’s roundabout means of referring to monstrous compulsions. She finds your word for it more artful than the fact, and has never admitted to what her own might be. You wonder if it might have to do with her one woman crusade against her people-hungry competition. If Karkat is truly able to resist his own monstrous internal code, it might explain why Kanaya has so far failed to dismember him.

You tell her so, because you are surprised she hasn’t.

She sniffs, hands coming together in her lap so that one thumb might smooth again and again over the other. “I required assistance. I told him I could have his help or his head. …What.”

You stare. “I didn’t expect you to be so frank.”

“You’re a seer, and you were there. I won’t condescend to lie.”

“Then will _you_ tell me why you took the cue ball?”

“No,” she says with the determination of a captain on a sinking ship.

You quirk your mouth. “A running theme emerges.”

“And I did not tell Karkat either, so there is no point in your clambering upstairs to bully him with your tool shed until you have squeezed an answer from his emotional chest.”

“I’m sure even now John must be terrorizing him with harrowing advances of amiability.”

“Rose, this is quite serious.” She frowns, but tentatively. “Did you dream last night?”

 

Your head screams.

Your mouth does not move much when you speak. “Now this is a topic of conversation we’ve never entertained.”

Kanaya leans forward, minutely, but the world cracks around her. “You did. What about?”

“I find my way to a dark room,” you say, words inching, “and there is… someone there with me. I am not alone. Someone who watches. Someone who glows, as though dappled with diamonds. I whisper, ‘I know what you are.’ And they murmur, ‘Say it. Out loud.’”

Kanaya cuts you off with an exasperated noise. “I should have known. You’ve never confided in me. It’s irritating and—”

“You don’t do well at giving me a reason to.”

“—so I understand your total inability to tell me anything honestly as a mere side effect of your natural charms. To counter your deliberate obscurations, I will ask clearly: Did you meet a man in the darkness?”

You set your teacup on the table and instantly regret it; your hands shake, tremble even after you’ve returned them to the chair arm. “Oh, yes. The height of clarity.”

“I _have_ to know, Rose.” The fingers of her hand dig into the other. “You must tell me.” She swallows, frustrated. “You must tell _someone_.”

“What exactly do you know?” Your throat tightens. “You’ve never given the faintest impression of savvy to my business with the cue ball before. Though I suppose given your persistent interest in us, I should have caught on.”

She seems at a loss for words, clutching her hands together, and for once profoundly helpless. “The cue ball is hardly what interests me, Rose.”

Your ears blister from inside and out. You snort.

If it weren’t for the unsounded miasma pulsing in your mind, if it hadn’t been that you did meet a man in the darkness, you would assume Kanaya was simply fucking with you for the sheer delicious perversity of it all. But the fact is that you are deaf with bellows and you are not alone in the lack, and whatever Kanaya knows, she will not say. You could scream.

You breathe and smooth your fingers across the front of the chair arm. “I assume there’s no chance of appealing to your slayer’s duty to cut the cue ball out of your pet.”

Kanaya’s face screws; it is utterly unsophisticated. You have lost track of the score, but don’t think even this pushes it to fall in your favor. “What a horrid thing for you to suggest.”

“I am in straits.”

“You don’t want the cue ball.”

You smile. You are already smiling. You must look beastly mad. “Unless you give me a reason not to, I rather do. You have torn the engine from my car.”

“You _don’t_ want the cue ball.”

With that you stand. You wobble and ignore it. “Thank you for the tea.”

She stands to match you and takes a step forward. Sudden insight burns bright in every corner of your neural array, a power surge of revelation. You are at this precise moment exactly where you are meant to be. You have no godly understanding of why.

Kanaya’s mouth is shut tight when she comes next to you, green in her eyes, and you think, for a second, fear too. Her hand lays flat against your feverish cheek. The corner of your smile pushes against her palm.

“You’re here because of…” she trails off, as if she knows what that means. She probably does. She might know more than you. How damn old are the nails beneath your lashes? How decrepit, her bones? “Fuck.” Her mouth closes tight. Her fangs will be cutting the inside of her lip. “We probably shouldn’t see each other. Not for… a while.”

“You’re very good at that.” You can’t raise your voice above a shaky admonition, and it infuriates you. “This is a good distance. Verily I am wowed.”

Kanaya squints. She thinks her glare imperious. She moves her hand to yours, and brings it to her mouth for a polite kiss.

You seize her face and pull her down for something you want much more.

 

 

==>Rose: Fail to defenestrate the vampire.

 

“Why,” you ask as you pull your socks back on, “did Karkat call you hysterical?”

“Because I helped him eat last night and he is displacing his emotions.” She drapes on her pillows with the air of an over-indulged cat. Fucking quiets the both of you, for the better or worse.

You shrug on your jacket and beckon her close again. She moves to press her chest to your back and wrap her arms around your shoulders. Her poor circulation makes her a terrible shawl. You turn your head to press your cheek to hers. “And of what does a werewolf’s diet consist?”

“I did not feed him a person, Rose, don’t be wretched.” She takes your chin and grazes the side of your mouth with her own.

“Hm.” You smile against her lips. “The cue ball won’t be coming out of him any time soon, I trust.”

Her mouth tightens under yours. “No.”

 

 

“And Karkat’s curious case of indigestion is surely why his eyes are wont to flash with green, a la the fairy light of a merciless Fitzgeraldian metaphor. Or, say, your own.” You tap her sternum with your pointer finger and shake your head at her frown. “See? No one’s sharing. We are the shame of every kindergarten class.”

If Kanaya wishes to protest, she is choked by the effort to quash down the mysteries she insists on withholding. Her lips thin.

You swipe your thumb across them and pat her cheek as you stand. “I suspect I’ll see you around.”

The whine in your head has quieted, but it will grow again in time. You leave with no promises.

 

==>

 

You find John and Karkat on the porch. John asks if you heard Karkat scream. Karkat says you wouldn’t have, because any and all screaming can be traced to an Egbertian origin. You open your mouth to make innuendo and John pushes his camera into your hands.

 

==>Rose: Play

 

 

John has a knack for interviews. That is not what interests you.

 

 

As far as you can tell, any and all screaming was a joint effort.

 

 

John swears they had closed the door. You're inclined to believe him.

 

==>

 

You advise Karkat to tell Kanaya of her unexpected guest. John advises Karkat to not get eviscerated. Karkat advises both of you to go fuck yourselves.

On the front lawn, no evidence of the interloper or their shadow remains. John gives a thumbs up to Karkat, who lurks in the window like a Victorian widow.

 

 

“I think he’s going to stick around,” says John as you clamber back into Kanaya’s station wagon. You take the wheel. You agreed it was probably for the best. “I hope so. He has to teach Jade how to not eat people.”

Something about the notion sticks in your craw. Try as you might to fish it out and get a better look, it stays there.

You won’t discover the problem with Karkat’s diet for at least a month to come.

 

==>

 

END OF ACT ONE

 

==>

 

 

==>

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaand we are officially on hiatus. Gonna spend the next however long it takes editing our novel-thing! It's still romantic defenestration and wonked out monstrous shenanigans, so I think we're in the proper mood. In the meantime, parastuck bits, bobs, doodles, and snippets, will find their way here: http://parastuck.tumblr.com
> 
> We personally can be found here: http://barbaricyip.tumblr.com (Odradek) and here: http://ladyofshallnot.tumblr.com (guess)
> 
> Also thank you, delicious lovelies, for paying such nice attention to us. This project pushed me to play around with art in a way I haven't in years. The learning curve keeps chucking me off at sharp angles. Loving it.
> 
> See you back here in no more than a couple months, hopefully :)
> 
> -Odradek


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